Boston's Massacre by Eric Hinderaker (review)

In standard reckonings of the American Revolutionary period, the "Boston Massacre"—a 1770 confrontation between British troops and Bostonians that left five men dead—often figures as a harbinger of things to come. Eric Hinderaker's Boston's Massacre approaches this event instead as an "irreducible mystery" swirling with contested interpretations in its own time and for long afterwards (p. 1). Examining it through its retrospective legacies, Hinderaker probes the ways in which meaning has been made of the Boston Massacre as the subject first of rivaling, tendentious narratives, and later, of disputed commemorative importance.

Boston's Massacre draws its analytic framework from memory studies, which posits a "three-stage interpretation of the way historical consciousness evolves" from event to narrative to memory (p. 7). The book's ten chapters unfold along this trajectory. Chapter one cuts closest to the event of the Boston Massacre by examining the testimony given in the shootings' immediate aftermath. Hinderaker is quick to observe, however, that while a clear fault line emerges in these accounts between the interests of town and Crown, the testimonies themselves are contradictory, and bring us no nearer to resolving the "factual disputes" they delineate (p. 23). Chapters two through four thus reach back to the Stamp Act crisis (1765) for context, touching on disputes over trade and currency reform (chapter two), attitudes toward crowd action (chapter three), and adjustments to British administration of imperial spaces (chapter four) in the years leading up to Boston's occupation. Chapters five and six cover the period of the occupation, while chapters seven and eight discuss the competing narratives surrounding the Massacre from the shootings to the trials. Finally, chapters nine and ten track the evolving memory of the Boston Massacre over time, touching on its commemoration in Boston during the Revolutionary War, the reclamation of Crispus Attucks by African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, and the interpolation of the Massacre into histories of police brutality during the post-Civil Rights era.

At once a meticulous documentary investigation and a reflection on the messy production of historical meaning, Boston's Massacre marks a refreshing break from the teleological imperatives and ideological explanations that long dominated Revolutionary historiography. In lieu of treating the Boston Massacre as an occasion for unifying narrative, Hinderaker underscores the disparity and contradiction at its heart, exposing how "a retrospective veneer of clarity" has been repeatedly applied to "an episode that was chaotic, poorly understood, and—in important ways—inexplicable" (p. 187). The result is a nuanced analysis which insists that the Boston Massacre has from the outset borne historical significance without being representative for an emergent pan-colonial political consciousness. Indeed, as his title suggests, Hinderaker argues for the Boston Massacre as a strongly localized event whose influence outside Boston's immediate environs in the 1770s has been overstated. Yet his analysis also shows that Bostonians were neither unanimous nor consistent in their appraisal of the Massacre's import. For Hinderaker, the Massacre's resistance to interpretive consolidation is in many ways its keynote: "All of these controversies illustrate the usefulness of the Boston Massacre as a touchstone of American identity, and also the limits of its power to generate a consensus response" (p. 283).